Simon Fleming

Biography

Simon Fleming is a research leader in photonics, with over thirty year’s experience. His research has focussed mainly on optical fibre and has spanned all aspects, from materials and fabrication through to devices; and from discovery to applied. His research track record of over three hundred publications, twenty patents and numerous grants is complemented by extensive experience in working with industry and in the translation of research into commercial outcomes. He has supervised twenty research students. 

Research Interest

Over the last few decades photonics has revolutionised telecommunications - not only the internet, but mobile telephony, would not exist in anything like their current forms, if at all, without the huge bandwidth unleashed by the deployment of optical fibre technology / photonics. Simon Fleming chose a PhD topic of involving the first generation of high capacity fibres, and has been an active researcher in this field ever since. Simon's research interests in photonics span both the underlying science, such as the materials and structures and their fabrication and characterisation, and the applications of the technology. His more fundamental areas of current interest are in metamaterials and poling. His application research interests have diversified as telecommunications photonics have matured. In particular he is interested in how the technological innovations developed in the telecommunications revolution can be applied to other important areas such as biomedicine, energy and advanced manufacturing. Metamaterials are an exciting new class of artificial materials that offer extraordinary properties (including invisibility), however they involve making very regular arrays of metals and dielectrics on scales much smaller than the wavelength of light. He established a research group that has applied the same technology that is used to make optical fibre to make metamaterials. To date they have successfully demonstrated the ability to engineer the permittivity and the permeability of the materials. They are now starting to create devices based on these exotic materials; most recently demonstrating a hyperlens that can focus to 1/28th of the wavelength, which is more than an order of magnitude better than conventional materials. Poling is the field-assisted modification of the properties of a material. The main focus of this research has been to induce a second-order non-linearity in glass to permit electro-optic modulation, second harmonic generation and entangled photon generation. All of these important effects have been demonstrated in the laboratory. However, the research focus is currently on increasing the effect sufficiently to enable fibre and waveguide devices which will have a real-world technological impact. Simon Fleming has made a series of significant contributions to this field, especially in elucidating the mechanism involved. Biophotonics is an exciting area that seeks biomedical applications of photonic and optical fibre technology. Recent projects have included fibre-optic dosimetry for radiation treatment of cancer, laser detection of the early stages of dental caries, and multimodal (optical and electrical) neural interfaces.